Creating a ready-now leader from your current employee is one of the best types of career development opportunity, that a company can offer to its employees.

If you want to grow a leader, you primarily need to look for talents within your organisation and not seek for external talent sources. This means to get the leader you want, from your current employee.

There are many reasons, why you need to look for talent internally within your organisation. The two main reasons are as below:

1. It is a strategic way to engage your employee with the organisation.
2. It is one of the best strategic approaches to empower key talents and retain them.

Imagine, how your employees will feel valued and embrace transformation on realising, that you are preparing them to be the next organisational leader of change.

What do you think matters to employees in terms of motivation, satisfaction, engagement, etc.?

Swinging between the possibility of engagement levels being either extremely high or low, the next step is to sustain these engagement levels, change preconceived notions and make them grow with the company in a longer run.

To perform this you need to primarily realise that it is not a one-time execution, but an ongoing process that commences right from the day one, when your employee decides to join and become a member of your organisation.

Here are some of the steps on, how you can transform your current employee into an effective ready-now leader:

• Empower your employee.
• Create a role for your employee, not just some tasks to perform.
• Know your employee well enough to keep them self-motivated.
• Create and grow your employee’s self-confidence.
• Make your employees feel valued for their contributions and see themselves as an integral part of the organisation’s bigger picture.
• Create an attainable goal for your employee that helps them participate in the leadership evaluation, even if the project is of small-scale. Allow your employees to gauge their self-ability and competence as a leader.
• Bear your employees/workforce on mind before initiating action plan and involve them actively in management decisions.
• Do not assume employee reactions to a chance in policy or process flow, rather ensure seamless communication in a team and effective collaboration.
• Define your quarter on the awareness-matrix regards leadership.
• Treat your employee in a professional, fair and respected manner at all times to infuse them with the most important leadership traits: respect, integrity and fairness.
• Treat your employee as your strategic business partner.
• Value your employee first as your internal customer to make sure he’s satisfied working for your company.
• Define a structure based on team work to initiate leadership early on, from team leader perspective.
• Starting from day one, the organisational aspects, business goals and workplace culture have to be clear to your employees.
• Implement the traditional wise “walk your talk”, do not ruin your efforts to make a ready-now leader by being unprofessional at work.
• Study your employee carefully and observe their behaviours to know from where to start inculcating leadership training.
• Listen carefully to your employee and take feedback seriously for inclusion if the idea will help support business growth.
• Believe in leadership abilities of your employees to make them feel worthy of being the next leader.
• Work on your employee’s loyalty system.

The more you make your employees valued for their contributions, and empower their ability to be the next leader, the more they will continue to be engaged to upscale your organisation to new heights of success. This process of creating a ready-now leader is ongoing, and one of the most effective ways to motivate key talent and retain them with the company.

Author credit:

Hazem Hassan, founder of Employee Based Management. Having qualified in HRM studies from the American university at Cairo, he has served reputed MNCs such as PepsiCo in the strategic role of a HR specialist during his career. Currently, he’s working on research and studies, garnering insights for his upcoming book on Employee Based Management, which will be available to readers soon. For more details, you can connect with the author on LinkedIn here.

Image credit: Freepik